Items where Keyword is "Mood" (Publications and Working Papers)

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Braun-LaTour, Kathryn A., Puccinelli, Nancy and Mast, Fred
(2007)
Mood, Information Congruency, and Overload.
Journal of Business Research, 60 (11).
pp. 1109-1116.
Link to full text available through this repository.

Abstract

Marketers seek new ways of gaining attention in our age of information bombardment, and one popular way has been to utilize schema-incongruent language. The present article investigates how a common situational factor–consumer mood–influences consumers' ability to process incongruent information in an information overload environment. Two experiments find positive mood increases (and negative mood decreases) consumers' ability to respond to incongruent information. Both experiments utilize computer reaction tests on healthy adult consumers; the first uses the Stroop test, the second uses the IAT (Implicit Association Test). This article discusses the implications of the findings for marketers attempting to gain consumers attention as well as the theoretical implications for the growing research on consumer mood and processing.

This study investigated the effects of mood on product evaluation. Subjects were asked to evaluate the stereo speakers on which they heard music that induced either a good or a bad mood. Subjects' awareness of the music as the source of their mood was manipulated to be high or low. The results of this 2 x 2 design suggested that under low source awareness, mood biased the evaluation of the speakers, in that subjects evaluated the speakers more favorably when in a good mood than in a bad mood. By contrast, under high source awareness there was no difference in speaker evaluations between those in a good or bad mood. A consideration of those in a good or bad mood suggested that it was only the former who were able to correct for the bias in their evaluations when made more aware of the source of their mood. These results suggested that even when motivated to attend to an outside stimulus and to evaluate it objectively, those in a bad mood may have a limited ability to do so.

This article extends the discussion of congruity or the preference by consumers for alternatives similar to themselves 1) by examining the effect in a retail context and, 2) by considering the moderating role of self-monitoring, or the tendency to regulate one's mood in line with the social context, on congruity. Two experiments find that when low self-monitors imagine a context that differs in valence from their mood, they feel more distinctive from the environment while high self-monitors do not. The feelings of low self-monitors, in turn, seem to lead them to prefer contexts that are congruent in valence with their mood. High self-monitors on the other hand prefer a context that differs in valence from their mood. It is argued that high self-monitors seek a mood-incongruent context to achieve normative regulation of their mood. The implications of these results for retail atmospherics are discussed.